Optimizing Images
Image quality and quantity are important for a website speed & performance, and also important for user experience. You need to find a balance between them.
Before uploading your images to your website, please optimize your images first (using Photoshop or other image editing tools). Please check this article: How to Optimize Images for Better Web Design & SEO.
- Optimal file size: The number of bytes the file takes up on your computer. This is the factor that can slow your website way down. A 15MB (megabyte) image is huge. Large images or full-screen background images should be no more than 1 MB. Most other small web graphics can be 300 KB or less.
- Image size: The actual dimensions of your image, in pixels. As we mentioned in the Image Size subchapter, the recommended width of images is at least 1920 px when it is supposed to be a full-width image (for example, a fullwidth post slider on the homepage). If the image is not used as a full-width image, you can resize your image to a smaller size.
After uploading your images to your website, you can install this plugin to further optimize them: Smush.
Image Size
To ensure that images on your site always look crisp and sharp on all devices, we recommend that images be at least 1920px wide (but no larger than 2560px wide or high) when it should be a full-width image.
Images will be scaled and saved into different sizes after you upload them. If your website already has some images before switching to PatioTime theme, you will need to regenerate these images into the new sizes. Please use this plugin: Regenerate Thumbnails. Otherwise, the theme will use the original images when the proper image sizes cannot be found, which may slow down your website performance.
You can set image sizes via dashboard > Settings > Media.
After you change the media size settings, when you upload new images they will be scaled and saved into the new sizes. But for the existing images, you can use this plugin to regenerate the new sizes: Regenerate Thumbnails.